Re: Early Earth likely had continents, was habitable, according to new study

In article <1132286476.678042.181230@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Landy wrote:
> But we've known about this for 10 years. What's new?
>
We've known about the great antiquity of the Jack Hills zircons
for around 10 years, but the oxygen isotope data (that suggests the
presence of a water cycle including major surface water quantities
during the Hadean) is much newer - only really 3 or 4 years old.

> Perhaps someone is trying to get grant $....
>
Or just possibly, since the first suggestions of an early wet
Earth (3-4 years ago) were based on samples from one area (Jack Hills),
people have since been trying to find comparable samples from other
areas to validate (or invalidate!) the hypothesis. You have heard about
the difficulties of doing statistics on samples of one, haven't you?
All those expressions of the form [something]/(n-1), where 'n' is
number of samples.

I listened to these programs (
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/madeforlife.shtml ) a few months
ago, which may be informative to you. Programme 1 from about 12 minutes
in.
Ohh, I've just worked out the sequence of hoops to jump through
to MP3 the program! Very useful - I can set the machine to record off
the radio, then put them onto the MP3 player to listen to when I'm on
the bus with lousy reception.

--
Aidan Karley,
Aberdeen, Scotland,
Location: 57°10'11" N, 02°08'43" W (sub-tropical Aberdeen), 0.021233

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